Joe Ferriso, Conrad Guevara, Chelsea Pegram

Curated by Anna Nearburg & Evan Reiser

Linchpin is an exhibition of recent sculpture by Joe Ferriso, Conrad Guevara and Chelsea Pegram. The works revolve around a compositional point of tension which supports the “weight,” both actual and metaphorical, of its cumulative parts. This precarity exposes vulnerability in otherwise sturdy objects, resulting in dynamic, architectural constructions tottering on the brink of total dissolution. They appear ready to unravel, a game of Jenga at its penultimate moment.

Each of the artists works primarily with common building materials, relying upon rigid, structural elements which belie the softer, more playful, and subtler aspects of the works. This dichotomy is achieved through delicate engineering and a deft use of gravity. The “linchpin” in these sculptures is the point at which they achieve balance and where art-making intersects with ontology, philosophy and mathematics.

Joe Ferriso’s plywood constructions, painted bright, contrasting colors, elegantly bend and fold from the wall. Held together with nothing more than clamps, the sculptures are modular, to be reconfigured and adapted as Ferriso sees fit. The plywood seems to defy its own physical limitations, challenging just how much an otherwise flat, rigid surface can be bent into a dynamic, curvilinear form.

Conrad Guevara’s multi-panel paintings on canvas are in held in place by implied and actual tension. The works present a dichotomy between functionality and sentimentality, caged by their component parts which adhere them to the wall and influence large swaths of their richly painted surfaces.

Chelsea Pegram uses MDF and concrete to create geometric, architectural works reminiscent of Brutalism, yet punctured by moments of soft, organic vulnerabilities. Sea shells embedded in concrete recall bodily orifices, while strips of sand and small rocks form long arcs inlaid to wood. These small reminders of sex, nature, and fragility are almost hidden from the viewer. Their power is their rarity, subtle masses overwhelmed by the harsh, monolithic fortresses surrounding them.

The Stealing Bodies

Ellie Hunter

Opens August 31st 6 - 9 PM

On view by appointment through October 29th

In ‘The Stealing Bodies,’ Ellie Hunter creates a transformative installation playing with a dichotomy between individuality and institutionalism. Hunter’s work builds upon Sara Ahmed’s assertion that “the personal is institutional.”* The central piece in the show is a sterile, tiled platform fused with a soft and varied anthropomorphic form. In this flattening of surface and subject, the work reacts to the ways in which we simultaneously conform to and imprint upon our built environments.

The homogenous landscapes of our disciplinary institutions present specific paths of interaction, undermining opportunities for difference and individualized experience.** Our bodies’ interaction is rarely aligned with the predetermined usage and ergonomics of mass architecture. As the technologies and spaces that govern our bodies entangle themselves with our physicality, Hunter investigates her own place within these environments.

The location of Some Time Salon within a home further blurs the boundaries between personal, institutional, alienating and comforting. The work injects intimacy and vulnerability into a coded, sterile environment, examining the paradox of contemporary embodiment.

Hunter recently completed a MFA in Sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the cofounder of the project space The Sunroom, and has an upcoming show at VOX Populi in Philadelphia.

* Ahmed’s revision of the phrase “the personal is political” ** Hunter’s thinking was influenced by “Bodies-Cities” by Elizabeth Grosz, in Sexuality and Space edited by Beatriz Colomina

STACCATO

Kate Bonner, Lauren Clay, Sean Talley & Rachel Eulena Williams

Opening, Saturday, June 10th, 4 - 7 PM

On view through August 16th by appointment

Staccato finds Zadie Smith’s description of “pure cinema” in works by Kate Bonner, Lauren Clay, Sean Talley, and Rachel Eulena Williams: an “interplay of light and dark, expressed as a kind of rhythm, over time.”* The artists’ lines are woven together in a delicate dance of material structure and dynamic color. Elements of their daily life are translated into truncated notes and scrawling lines, creating dense histories of space in self-contained works.

Kate Bonner manipulates photographs by cutting, folding, scanning, and photoshopping them—thus removing the significance of place and time from her reference imagery. The resulting compositions are printed on machine-cut MDF which she assembles into bisecting planes of wood. The blend of imagery, abstraction, and negative space creates beguiling architectural depth.

Lauren Clay’s monochromatic, geometric sculptures are a more direct reflection of her persona and interests. Her most recent works are embodiments of yogic asana (physical postures)— autonomous objects whose lyricism & subtlety depart from the direct linearity of modernist masculine structures.

Sean Talley’s drawings and sculptures (both in clay and steel) are artifacts of a digital fascination. The consistency of the strokes, hard lined edges, and symbols reminiscent of computer gaming. Like a musical score, Talley's marks are but abstract symbols, dots and lines. The artist's deft use of composition informs context and meaning.

Rachel Eulena Williams’ intricate structures of rope and cut, painted canvas are flowing abstractions. She copies handwritten signage around New York City into her paintings as a means of connecting to community and honoring a dying art form. Though often illegible, or barely discernible as text in her finished work, the symbols of language and the arced shapes of her cut canvases lend a phonetic relationship to the figures, sound sans words.

*Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), 3.

Kate Bonner received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012. She lives and works in Oakland, CA. In 2013, Bonner was included in NextNewCA, a survey of select California MFA graduates at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. She has exhibited at San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, Torrance Art Museum, The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, Luis De Jesus Gallery, Et al Gallery, Queens Nails, The Popular Workshop, Important Projects, Paris Photo LA, NADA New York, The Hole, NY and LV3, Chicago, among others. She is represented by Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles and Et. al. in San Francisco.

Lauren Clay (b. 1982, Mississippi) lives and works in Brooklyn. She recently completed a large site-specific installation for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Other solo exhibits include installations at Grounds for Sculpture, NJ; Savannah College of Art and Design; Larissa Goldston Gallery, NY; and Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta. Recent group exhibitions include Monochromatic at Asya Geisberg Gallery, NY; Shroom Show at Helper Gallery, Brooklyn; Drawing for Sculpture at TSA New York; and Quite Fairly Rather at Topless Gallery, New York. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, and Art in America.

Sean Talley (b. Modesto, California, December 23, 1980) is an artist living in Berkeley, California. His non-representational works are formally simplistic with an emphasis on unassuming materials and refined processes. His artwork has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, Et al. Gallery, Important Projects, Jancar Jones Gallery, Moroso Projects, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Talley received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991, Miami, FL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from Cooper Union. Past exhibitions include Bluets at Burning in Water (New York), Dreams come true at Sleep Center (New York); Epizootics at DTCV Firehouse (New York); and Dog Show at Center Street (New York). She completed a residency at the NY Studio Factory in Brooklyn.

The other line

Daniel Gibson & Bruna Massadas

On view through May 24th

By appointment & Wednesdays, 6 - 9 PM

Some Time Salon presents new painting and drawing by Daniel Gibson and Bruna Massadas. The narrative works transcend a strained or tenuous relationship to verbal and written language. Despite disparate styles, the artists’ intuitive approach displays the gleeful pleasure each takes in the process of painting. Executed without planning, the works emanate the artists’ longing for easy communication that doesn’t bear the burden of language.

Daniel Gibson’s work addresses the alienness of existence with severe dyslexia. Personality spills out of his inkwells. He dips a bamboo stick or ceramic tool into sumi ink to draw un-contained, raw, and loose lines. Translating these reference drawings into paintings, the essence of the pooling ink remains—lending a grimy and rough line quality. The looming specter of a childhood in border towns is reflected in the wide eyes and hands of the crouching, hidden and reclining figures composing his works. Alongside art history, Gibson references gang signs and the chain-link fences and gates of his hood. The works explore a conflicted relationship between past and present: the rawness of an artist’s guilt at succeeding in a “leisurely” career and the trick of assimilating to the lofty art world.

Bruna Massadas’ work mines the anxious anticipation she felt upon answering the phone after immigrating to the US from Brazil at 15. The phone signifies meanings lost in translation to a new language and new customs. An overwhelming count of tight, highly controlled oil pastel strokes compose grotesque female faces. Massadas depicts women in private conversations. The pieces speak within themselves leaving the story open ended and the viewer on the outside. Descriptive titles, exaggerated expressions, and frenzied background clues hint towards the character’s narrative. Massadas relies on humor to access authenticity; and laughter to transcend verbal communication.

Daniel Gibson (Born 1977, Yuma, Arizona) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Inspired by his upbringing in the desert of California and surrounding Mexicali border towns, Gibson's freewheeling methodology is an homage to the vast desert horizon and emptiness that lends its path to imagination and wander. He studied at San Diego City College and Art Center College of Design and has exhibited at O.N.O Gallery (LA), LAXart, BBQLA, and Half Gallery (NYC), among others.

Bruna Massadas is a Brazilian-American painter based in Oakland, California. Her work has been featured in publications including New American Paintings (2013) and American Chordata (2015) and shown in museums such as the Wattis Institute (2012) and the Museum of Latin American Art (2008). Massadas attended the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT (2016) and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design Residency, in Brooklyn, NY (2011). She received a dual B.A. & B.F.A. from California State University, Fullerton (2009) and an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts (2012).

Carolyn Janssen: "I" that I know at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY

Anna Nearburg brings an installation by LA-based Carolyn Janssen to SPRING/BREAK Art Show featuring a brand new 3 x 26' wallpaper and prints on paper.

Adopting the sprawl of the historic landscape, Carolyn Janssen creates mural-sized digital works that exist as photographic and painterly hybrids. Framed as psychedelic Photoshop objects, these images feature über-universes that reference the sublime landscape, digital kitsch, miniaturized science fiction tableaus, and religious morality tales. Built from personal snapshots, each scene develops mark by mark, as individual objects become brushstrokes. She manipulates Photoshop the same way a painter might the inherent qualities of paint—saturating, abusing, and “anointing” in order to achieve a hyper-superficial, incredibly detailed, texturized surface. Populating these worlds are figures engaging in ritualistic narratives and mini-dramas, creating uncanny and fetishized scenes that examine the blurred borders of gender, desire, and materiality.

In "I" that I know, Janssen performs for the camera, posing and transforming herself from female to male, from gendered body to art object. She undoes the rules of femininity as taught by a conservative, religious upbringing. Hinting at the double life led by many LGBTQ individuals, she recalls the duplicity and divided-self of Dorian Gray. Her bodily metamorphosis as documented in the work offers her vulnerability to the viewer, the body prostrate in service to art. Yet, as much as the physical body is present, the autobiographical nature of the work is more subtle, read between the lines, drenched in fantasy. In the tradition of Cindy Sherman, Janssen hides in plain sight. She creates escape routes from the banalities of life and the trauma of the past, bundling them into maniacal landscapes. She flaunts Wilde’s words, the artist revealing herself along with the beauty and sin of the flesh.

Carolyn Janssen lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA at Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA at The University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill. She has exhibited widely at Quinta del Sordo (Madrid), Julie Saul Gallery (New York), North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco), Essex Flowers (New York), Patan Museum (Kathmandu), among others.

RELIQUARY

Dana Harel & Colette Robbins

Opening Sunday, January 20th, 2 - 6 PM

On view through March 22nd by appointment and Wednesdays 6 - 9 PM (Closed February 23 - March 8).

Dana Harel and Colette Robbins merge archaeology and psychology in works whose rough exteriors, negative space, and composition recall ruins and antiquities. They confront fragility and vulnerability by alluding to the destructive nature of time. The artists transform emotional discomfort into objects of beauty exploring the link between past and present, decay and regrowth.

Harel’s vessels explore the meeting of mind and matter. Beginning with an upturned skull as her base, Harel sculpts clay to form a mold into which she pours plaster. The freehandedness of the rough additive process preserves an element of the unknown in the vase. The inversion of the head serves as a symbol of the artist’s internal struggle and conflict. Yet, the sacred space of the skull is stable, untouched by the turmoil of the surrounding world. Harel presents fresh flowers blooming out of the sculptures—invoking the skull as a mechanism of rebirth and transforming the empty vessel into a breath of life.

Robbins has long been inspired by antiquities such as The Tricephalic Head, a stone sculpture from the first century CE. Its’ symmetry led her to obsessively paint Rorschach inkblots. She conceptualized the inkblots in 3-D format as visual, physical manifestations of her inner anxieties and emotional states. In a dizzying, meticulous, and time-consuming process, Robbins blends drawing, photography and digital technology to create the towering 3D printed sculptures. The sculptures illicit the human tendency to assign meaning and seek patterns in random information, known as apophenia or patternicity. The Totems give tangible form to the psychological and physiological history of the mind.

Dana Harel was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel. She received her B.Arch from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she currently works. Harel has had solo exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, Palo Alto Art Center, Gallery Wendi Norris (San Francisco), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (Herzliya, Israel), and Gensler Architects (San Francisco). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito), the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Napa Valley Museum, and Root Division (San Francisco). Dana received the Irvine Fellowship at the Montalvo Arts Center Residency in Saratoga in 2009.

Colette Robbins’ artistic practice explores the mind’s constant attempts to create meaning, build connections, and contextualize visual information. Robbins received her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of the Arts (MICA) and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. She has held residencies at Austevollportalen (Marstein Island, Norway), Cill Rialaig Project (Ireland), and The Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been shown at 101/Exhibit (Los Angeles), Mass Gallery (Austin), Field Projects (New York City), Deitch Projects (New York City), Koki Fine Arts (Tokyo), and Workshop Gallery (Venice, Italy), among others.

Brian Rochefort & Sarah Ann Weber

Opening Saturday, November 12th, 4 - 7 PM

Sarah Ann Weber and Brain Rochefort share a tactile, materially-based approach. Both artists sculpt and mold delicate media, resulting in works with a dynamic interplay of color, texture, and depth. They paint and scrape away layers of candy-sweet colors to obscure and reveal voids. Weber’s paintings, drawings, and three sculptural works in fondant will be presented alongside Rochefort’s ceramic paintings and vessels.

Weber’s light, airy studio in Downtown Los Angeles welcomes you with a rich, sweet aroma. It emanates from the melted marshmallows and powdered sugar that she stirs and kneads to create fondant. In fondant, she found a material ripe for experimentation that connected to her heritage—she spent years working at her family’s traditional Eastern European bakery on the South Side of Chicago. Weber “leans in” to the sickly sweet of her medium, confronting traditional notions of “woman’s work” or “a woman’s place” head on.

Her fingernails scratch into the smooth, white surface of the confection thinly rolled onto long panels of glass. Using a soldering iron, she burns, gouges and dashes, caramelizing the edges of the pockmarked sugar to a shiny brown. She then draws over her marks with colored pencil. Swaths of acrylic sink into the fondant like a fresco, reminiscent of the desert landscape surrounding LA. The succinct, frenetic marks are echoed in the expressionist style of Weber’s drawings and paintings. In the diptych-style paintings, hints of a figure in moody washes of green-blue and ochre-green peek out from behind short strokes of pastel pinks, baby blues, and Volkswagen yellows.

Rochefort’s studio is bright, crisp, and exceptionally clean, the precision of his process echoed in his surroundings. Rochefort uses different types of glazes in one piece, which requires mastering the trick of multiple firings at varying temperatures. In two wall pieces, Rochefort sculpts the clay, blending organic form with geometric abstraction. He then paints primary colors, followed by a crackling white glaze, revealing hints of the color below. The texture resembles desiccated earth, a sight sickeningly familiar to drought-wrought California.

The vessels drip wild acid-tripped colors; the sharp edges and globules could easily cut the lip of anyone who mistakes Rochefort’s cups for drinking glasses. Rochefort applies glaze sculpturally, building up surface texture and depth right to the limit of the weight the ceramic can withstand. It’s a delicate dance as the structure might buckle under the layers of the glaze and collapse during firing.

Sarah Ann Weber is based in Los Angeles and received her BFA at The Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her active studio practice includes painting, drawing, and sculpture. She has had solo exhibitions at The Franklin in Chicago and Rena Sternberg Gallery in Glencoe and group exhibitions at The Lodge and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, both in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Brian Rochefort is based in LA. He was born and raised in Rhode Island and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited internationally and was awarded the Lillian Fellowship from the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana 2007-2008.

October Salon as curated by Anna Nearburg at Under the Willow

At Under the Willow, Micah Ganske, Ellie Hunter, Carolyn Janssen, Nando Alvarez-Perez and Jacolby Satterwhite explore the body’s relationship to environment in utopian and dystopian landscape. The artists blend technology and classical mediums to address themes of personal and public mythology, science fiction and fantasy. Blurring the lines between the digital world and the real one; sculpture, painting, and photography; the past, present, and future; the artists create warped realities and envision alternate worlds or not too distant futures.

Rachelle Reichert

The Earth Rolls from Under

Opening Saturday, September 17th, 4 - 7 PM

Rachelle Reichert researches the usages and associations of her mediums by weaving story lines of scientific innovation and ecology into her art. At Some.Time.Salon (STS), Reichert will show work created while an artist in residence at Planet Labs (an earth imaging and aerospace company based in San Francisco) and Signal Fire (a weeklong camping residency in the Cascade Range near Portland, OR).

In The Earth Rolls from Under, Reichert uses drawing to explore the distance between a personal understanding of humanity’s impact on the planet and the representation of this impact depicted in satellite photography. During the settlement of the American West, the exploitation of natural resources occurred in conjunction with the glorification of the West as an idea - a sublime landscape imagined and reproduced in epic paintings by artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. Satellite images are hybridized, composite mosaics of photographs from varying dates and times woven together to create the most compelling image (and to hide proprietary technology from competitors). Reichert’s work investigates the implications of these manipulated photographs and the consequences of not acknowledging the scars our consumption has created on the Earth’s delicate surface.

A series of small graphite drawings depict the Fort McMurray fires at the Tar Sands in Canada. These fires and the fossil fuel extraction surrounding them sparked a national debate on climate change. Reichert references the unedited images that do not reach public consumption. The resulting works are subtly abstracted aerial landscapes playing with the dichotomies of light and dark and geometric and organic form. Bulbous clouds drift toward the viewer and large triangular planes of solid graphite slash through the compositions.

In the largest piece on view, rectangular and spherical shapes filled with graphite drawing bisect and overlap at odd angles, visually mimicking the way satellite imagery is collaged. Reichert drew from satellite images taken of the land during the time she was camping on Mt. Hood for the Signal Fire residency. Reichert’s drawing aims to expose the deforestation threatening that wilderness and how the manipulation of the satellite imagery may mask this fragmentation.

With ancestors in Italy, Reichert became interested in Carrara marble, which comes from a famous mountain that has been mined for over two thousand years and used in iconic examples of art and architecture such as the Pantheon and Michelangelo’s Pieta. She finds irregular scraps from the supplier rather than paying for new material. A marble sculpture imitates the peaks and valleys of mountainous terrain absent from Reichert’s drawings. The piece instills upon the viewer an enduring theme in all of Reichert’s work - the preciousness of this Earth and the care with which we should approach it so it does not become thus - cold and barren stone.

Rachelle Reichert is based in San Francisco, CA and received her MFA at Mills College. She has exhibited at SFMOMA Artists’ Gallery, San Francisco, CA; The Satellite Show, Miami, FL; Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA; and Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, CA; among others. She will have a solo exhibition in 2017 at the Monterrey Peninsula College Gallery.

The guests have already arrived and they're waiting for you… Norwood, a life-sized sculpture of steel-infrastructure, raw cotton, bubble gum, and almonds, beckons your arrival with caution; one outreached hand tinged red, the other wielding a branch. Enter the Salon and engage in the whimsical narratives of Dabbs Anderson.

Anderson's drawings and collages are at once endearing and off-putting. In Animal having supper with Sam, the angelic Animal sits next to Sam, pointy nails and fangs implying a menace at odds with his cartoonish lines and eyes towards both self awareness and absurdity. Her works are twee and macabre, as if Tim Burton and Wes Anderson alchemized the decorous sensibilities of a Southern Belle. Pastels and earthen tawny are the color palette for corpse-like figures backdropped against settings reminiscent of the Wild Wild West.

Ms. Anderson's companions journeyed across the West, collecting folklore and bringing with them a bit of camp and play to the Salon. Her tableaux are suspended in time, a freeze frame emotional response, whose mutable personalities manifest according to the reactions they illicit. Whether atop wooden moulding or lounging in the chairs next to you, they await the viewer's imagination to write the rest of their stories.

Dabbs Anderson is a multi-disciplined narrative artist. Anderson earned her BFA in printmaking at the University of Mississippi and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Anderson has exhibited throughout California, Mississippi, Alabama, Colorado, and Tennessee. She has taught art workshops in Jackson Hole, WY, and recently participated in an arts residency at The Steep Rock Artisans Guild in Telluride, CO.

Works by TIMO FAHLER & MAY WILSON

Opening May 20th, 6 - 9 PM

On view through July 8, 2016

Wednesdays, 5 - 9 PM & by appointment

For this matriarchy, Timo Fahler and May Wilson present bodies of work on an intimate scale. Adjusting their extensive visions to the smaller space of SOME.TIME.SALON (STS), each artist exhibits wall-mounted and free-standing sculpture. Though the works require an intense physicality to construct and install, their strong, almost masculine presence engages with rather than imposes upon the salon, a space named in reference to female salonnières of the Enlightenment.

Both Fahler and Wilson work in an additive process with mediums at once foreign and familiar. The resulting objects are both intimidating and inviting in equal measure. They improvise within and control time sensitive processes to capture a moment and freeze a gesture. Their formal pieces are carefully planned, yet never executed accordingly, creating a compelling off-handedness. They manipulate vinyl, cement, rebar, steel, and hyrdocal with a tenderness—femininity, even—at odds with the industrial materials.

The elegant, bulbous balloon in Fahler’s Self Portrait (the lines work) looks delicate and light yet is made of dense, sturdy hydrocal (a plaster-like substance more akin to concrete). The lines work seems like an inside joke referring to Fahler’s braided hair, mimicked in two pieces of linen hanging beneath an orb balanced on gold-plated rebar and steel.

Wilson, too, anthropomorphizes her sculptures, assigning them the personalities of teenagers maturing and outgrowing their awkward phase. Her limb-like slumps and folds of vinyl tubing are constantly in transition and flux, changing with each installation to engage directly with their environment.

Fahler’s piece, this matriarchy, will not be on view at STS, yet it lends its title to the exhibition as it is, in his words, “mother to a number of other ideas and works that are coming and a part of this series.” The works on view at STS are this matriarchy’s direct descendants, hanging around with Wilson’s gangly adolescents. Longing for a sense of place, they cling to the wall, holding tight to the architecture of this Victorian home.

Timo Fahler lives and works in Los Angeles. He received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles(2012) and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute (2009). Timo constructs visceral works from materials such as plaster, ceramics, steel, wood, and found objects. He combines mold-made forms with collected materials to create tactile sculptures addressing formalist principles and his Mexican heritage. Timo recently exhibited a solo showat LA><ART, Los Angeles, 2015.

May Wilson is based in San Francisco. Currently an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, Wilson received her MFA from University of California Davis in 2013. That year, she was awarded a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, a graduate fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts, and a Center for Cultural Innovation Grant. Her work has been exhibited at the di Rosa Foundation, Napa; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco; CULT: Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco; Aggregate Space, Oakland; Sonoma Art Museum; Creative Alliance, Baltimore, among others.

On view March 25th - May 8th, 2016. Opening March 25th, 6 - 9 PM.

Cadavre Exquis brings together works by Lauren A Toomer and Dana Nearburg. Laying on the floor, exposed and vulnerable, Toomer’s figures are instantaneously haunting. She so gracefully captures the essence of a person, the ghost of a life, through soft lines and subtle suggestions of form delineated by ethereal color. The intense loneliness and longing emanating from Nearburg’s vulnerable fleshy charcoals are unsettling. In Cadavre Exquis, solemn, solitary figures float in seas and hover over windows into exterior worlds - telling a story of detachment and fragmented existence. For the exhibition, Toomer and Nearburg will create an exquisite corpse - begun by Toomer, mailed to Nearburg, jointly finished. The playful, collaborative manner of the exercise echoes the ethos of SOME.TIME.SALON.

In Reflection, Nearburg’s face reflected in the mirror, creased with the lines of her years is surrounded by anti-aging ointments on the vanity. A supple girl lounges over the scene, obscuring Nearburg’s face and embodying the memory of youthful form. According to Nearburg, “the body ages, but you stay the same inside, your essential self does not age.”

Beginning with intaglio prints as a background, Nearburg superimposes figures from her life drawing class whose poses and attitudes relate to the mood she has in mind for the piece. The nude form enables a raw, emotional storytelling in her work. In Two Women, brief and assured marks delineate cheek bones, the flat line of the ulna, the creasing skin of a side bend. Women stand, sit and lounge atop imagined landscapes, struggling to find a point of contact with the worlds they envision for themselves.

In Toomer’s Fayum Portraits series, John and Jane Does composed of cross-hatching and gestural lines float on manila envelopes. Named after Egyptian portraits buried with the dead, the works honors these individuals, identities lost to history, by capturing their essence in the solitude of death. The delicate drawings of corpses lay the groundwork for Toomer’s study of the body.

Exploring the tissues and minutiae of anatomy, Toomer strayed from traditional portraiture to distill sinews of skin and muscle tone into a vocabulary of reusable marks. Each mark is a lone adjective until woven into complex sentences of graphite. Toomer implies as much content as she transcribes to paper, leaving the viewer to complete the piece. In the Body of Water series, the flex of a foot and curve of a head are barely distinguishable—shattered and fragmented by rippling, frothy water. The title a lightly tongue-in-cheek play on words referring to the submerged form and the womb.

Toomer’s pieces present our ultimate reality, death. Her radiating marks echo the pixelation of screens through which we hide ourselves from genuine engagement. Nearburg’s figures are paralyzed by inaction, awaiting the impetus to break through the glass window to another world. The figures in Cadavre Exquis catalyze us to participate in the shaping of the collective unconscious, to be enthralled and captivated by our surroundings.

Lauren A Toomer received her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley (summa cum laude). Her graduate studies included coursework in anatomy and education. Currently, Toomer instructs art & anatomy courses at Stanford University. Toomer garnered a fellowship from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Drawing of Excellence Award from UC Berkeley. She has exhibited in the directors offices at SFMOMA, the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Art on Paper Miami, and the Equal Justice Society exhibition at the University of San Francisco. She has been the guest artist speaker at SFMOMA’s Artists Gallery, the Anderson Collection, and UC Berkeley’s Art Department.

Dana Nearburg attended Smith College, NYU, and received a B.A. from the University of Texas in Plan II and a Masters in Architecture from The University of Texas School of Architecture. She practiced with HOK Dallas and as Dana Nearburg Architects. She has practiced art for over 30 years and has continued her studies in figure drawing and printmaking at Southern Methodist University.

Back in the 90s, sitting in her studio staring at all the detritus and ephemera gathered to make assemblages, Mary Durell was overwhelmed by decisions. She simplified. She chose one medium. She’s been working with tracing paper and wheat paste ever since.

However, Mary’s works are not simplistic. There is a serious craft to them, a painstakingly meticulous process that is both a challenge and a comfort. Mary’s long term familiarity with her materials informs her method. She knows the bounds of the delicate paper, when to work slow and be patient. Mary creates a wheat paste paper, lets it dry, molds it into shape, then adds another 30-40 layers of paper to create structure and support. This method is meditative to her, it nourishes her creative process by providing a consistent starting point to sidestep writers block or indecision.

SOME.TIME.SALON will be showing new works by Mary Durell. In the living room: a round, orb-like sculpture that emanates a soft glow alongside biomorphic squiggles shaped by tracing paper and highlighted with neon orange paint. The orb feeds off natural light to emphasize its translucency, the delicacy of the process, and its complexity; whereas the vivid orange of the wall hangings capture and refract light. In the hall: an installation of paper wall hangings are Mary’s exploration into creating a more practical and approachable body of work in two dimensions. They veer away from the softer, curved lines of Mary’s other work into a linear geometry still focused on form and composition. This installation mimics Mary’s studio where the wall space is covered in bits of paper experimentations, a visual representation of her ideaphoria.

SOME.TIME.SALON will be presenting at Art on Paper Miami [Booth J5] with works by Kari Cholnoky, August Oz, Colette Robbins, Lauren Toomer, The Second Impression, and Jake Ziemann.

SOME.TIME.SALON's booth features a playful conversation exploring the limits of 2D through color, line, and form between collages by Jake Ziemann, drawings by Kari Cholnoky, and painterly drawings by August Oz. The artists create whimsy in self-referential abstractions by utilizing quotidian materials and repetitive gestures. The sculptures on view - ceramics by Jake Ziemann and a hybrid of 3D printed plastic and paper by Colette Robbins - are both of the artists attempts to give physical form to the languages developed in their works on paper.

Ziemann utilizes paint, fragments of paper, and utilitarian materials such as plastic sheeting, staples, and tape to create collages whose malleable forms seemingly extend beyond the picture plane. Placing shapes until patterns begin to emerge, Ziemann’s process tests the elasticity of his materials, resulting in compositions that have been built up and broken down into refined chaos. Jake weaves themes through the paper by repetition of form and color - similar shapes cut and transmuted between the works, outlines sprayed, colors predominated.

Titles such as falling, irresolute and mimetic bring the drawings to life, jumping off the page as visual utterances. They are Jake’s attempt to provide tangible form to his relationships - to document the story between these surfaces, their physical contexts, and the personal experiences that informed their creation.

As a whole, Ziemann often sees each constructed image as a depiction of a three-dimensional object – a perceptual shift that he translates into hand-held, ceramic objects. Vibrantly painted and cartoonish in demeanor, his sculptures anthropomorphically flop and fold, referencing the body. At times, his ceramic forms interact with mundane, found objects, a gesture that symbolically nods to the nuances in personal relationships, suggesting a longing for connection and romance.

Pollock. Rothko. Mondrian. Three Artists. Three courses. Three Cocktails.

Inspired by Hannah Rothstein’s Thanksgiving Special photographs, in which she re-envisions famous artists’ Thanksgiving plates, SOME.TIME.SALON will host a meal of artful food play.

With your plate as your canvas, prepared foods are your building blocks to imitate works by Pollock, Rothko, and Mondrian. Each course will feature a cocktail and a curated palette of in-season delectables based on paintings by these artists. Reference images will be on hand to inspire your creativity. Transform your food into art, photograph your plate, and then eat it!

AUGUST OZ's vivid color drawings transform the quotidian into whimsy. Abstractions sabotage pattern-filled landscapes creating a sense of the Romantic coupled with self-satire.

Oz was born in Houston, Texas. He has since lived in Detroit, New York and Berlin. Oz received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy. He currently is based out of San Francisco.

SOME.TIME.SALON presents a new series of drawings by August Oz’ along with his art books. August’s art books echo in form the connection between person and art object that the Salon seeks to foster. He began creating art books to circumvent limitations of space sans studio. Inherently intimate, the folios beg to be held delicately. Flipping pages and reading the drawings consecutively like a book, they are interpreted as a whole comprised of single entities. Interacting with the books feels like a glimpse into Auggie’s “Oz.” His preoccupations with color, rejection of the distinction between abstraction and representation, and the frenetic quality of his marks all seem to mimic the inner workings of his mind - its hyperactivity and intense thoughtfulness.

OZ’s new works take these drawings beyond the confines of the book into a series exploring the four seasons. Through this conceptually simple framework, Oz aims to relieve the pressure and weight of art history. Albert Oehlen and David Hockney inspire Oz - two artists are unapologetically true to themselves, self-indulgent even, in their painting. Oz hopes to find a similar ease and restfulness in his mark making. Yet, the works belie this honest intent, wrestling with the question of authenticity. When does candor defect to satire?

Colette’s works evoke a visceral sense of my place on this earth, of my body in relation to my surroundings. Long inspired by natural forms – sprays of water, caves, mountains, islands – her graphite paintings have depicted heads morphing and blending into environments of rock and stone, sand and dirt.

Though the presence of the body is not quite so literal in her new works, I find anatomy in the outline of her Rorschachs and the patterns within them – a pelvic bone, conjoined heads, breasts. This tendency to assign meaning, to see familiarity where there is none, labeled “patternicity” by Michael Shermer, fascinates Colette. She has also begun to experiment with a new medium, watercolor, creating contrast between ethereal colors and dark backgrounds that glow like a starry night.

Robbins received her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of the Arts (MICA) and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. She has held residencies at Austevoll Kunst Symposium (Marstein Fyr Island, Norway), Cill Rialaig Project (Ireland), and The Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been shown at 101/Exhibit (Los Angeles), Mass Gallery (Austin), Deitch Projects (New York City), P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York City), and Workshop Gallery (Venice, Italy), among others.

In his recent paintings, Bryon Christman moves beyond the bounds of black and white. By superimposing blocks of color with hard angles and lively brush strokes, he creates an architectural sense of depth. The playfulness and shifting, tilting perspective in the works perhaps stem from Bryon’s own perception of the world. Byron is color blind, and therefore unable to distinguish between the contrasting teal and red in his paintings. Alternating colors, he paints in an intuitive, organic manner, building layers by focusing on line quality and overall composition. He relies on instinct versus planning.